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Steven Baker is a partner in the Litigation department and a member of the International Arbitration group. He has over 25 years of experience advising clients on complex, often multi-jurisdictional disputes in a wide range of industries, including asset management, technology, life sciences, financial services and defence sectors. He also has extensive experience advising upon and managing disputes for clients involving major technology or telecommunications projects and their financing, technology licensing and misappropriation of trade secrets.

Steven is ranked as a leading litigator for banking and financial services litigation in both Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners, who comment that “Steven is a tremendous litigator – he is very clever and efficient and handles multiple clients well” as well as being ”very thoughtful, very into the detail, but equally takes a very commercial stance”, “Very good at running complex commercial disputes, very bright and a pleasure to deal with” and “has a really good grasp of complex banking litigation.” He was named by Benchmark Litigation as its inaugural "UK Lawyer of the Year" in 2019 as well as a National Litigation Star (2019-2021). He was also designated a  Client Services All-Star by the BTI Consulting Group, which selects lawyers who "deliver outstanding legal skills and superior client services" based on interviews with legal corporate counsel at the world's leading organizations.

Steven lectures on dispute resolution-related matters, including on the M. Sc. Major Projects course at Said Business School, University of Oxford. He is also the co-author of a leading publication on technology disputes entitled, “IT Contracts and Dispute Management: A Practitioner's Guide to the Project Lifecycle”, a second edition having been commissioned.

In the first two instalments of our series we examined the progress of English law to provide a secure and certain legal infrastructure for cryptoasset investment and management. In particular, we looked at how recent English case law has addressed the following questions:

(1) Are cryptoassets property and (2) Can

In the first part of this series of articles, we examined the progress of English law to shape and build an infrastructure to support the development of a secure and certain environment for investment in digital assets. We considered how recent English case law has addressed the questions of whether

Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls, wants English law to be at the forefront of developments relating to cryptoassets and smart contracts. In his thought-provoking foreword to the government-backed UK Jurisdictional Taskforce’s (UKJT) Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts, he explained that English law should aim

In the recent case of Kyla Shipping Co Ltd v Freight Trading Ltd [2022] EWHC 376 (Comm) the English Commercial Court rejected a claim to litigation privilege over preliminary investigations conducted by a party appointed expert on the basis that litigation in respect of the matter being investigated was not in reasonable prospect at the relevant time. However, the court also held that there was no waiver (or a wider collateral waiver) of privilege in respect of documents relating to how the mispricing claim was discovered (including the expert’s investigations) by the claimant’s solicitor having referred to them in a witness statement.

Litigation privilege applies to confidential documents or communications where at the time the communication or document was created litigation was in reasonable prospect; and it was created for the dominant purpose of the litigation.

In the recent and significant Warren v DSG Retail Ltd [2021] EWHC 2168 (QB) decision the High Court in England clarified the limited circumstances in which claims for breach of confidence, misuse of private information and the tort of negligence might be advanced by individuals for compensation for distress relating